December is the most delicious of months. Cookbooks, freshly inked, vamped it up on bookstores; authors are criss-crossing continents and oceans, talking about food, cooking for fans and getting us revved up for cooking adventures or Christmas book ideas.

In Vancouver, most authors head to Barbara-jo’s Books To Cooks to share food with fans, sign books and talk about their food. I caught up with some of these authors and these are snippets of my conversations with them.

Mourad Lahlou.

His cookbook, Mourad: New Moroccan (Artisan, $46) is so imbued with his passion and so redolent with the flavours of Morocco, I wanted to drop everything and board a flight. Mourad is as cerebral as he is sensuous and emotional about his food.

If things had gone according to original plans, he would have his PhD in Economics and be a suit at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. But cooking for himself as a student thwarted plans. Homesick for the ritual of daily lunches with his extended family in which everyone had a hand, he learned to cook the dishes from memory. Somehow, it morphed into opening a Moroccan restaurant, Aziza, which went on to earn a Michelin star.

“It was drastic for me,” he says of the culinary shock when he moved to San Francisco. “I felt like I was eating food stripped of any kind of soul. So many days, I’d be so sad and heartbroken,” he says.

That mid-day meal was the emotional heart of the family; they planned it in the morning, shopped at the markets, then the women cooked and no one ate until everyone had gathered.

“The Occupy Wall Street people talk about the 99 per cent. In Morocco, it’s 99.9 per cent. I thought if I came to the West with the biggest middle class in the world, I’d figure it out and do something.”

What he learned, however, was an appreciation for his life in Marrakech. “We didn’t have much. We were a large family and our happiest times were spent around the table. We didn’t have much to show off and cooking was the only vehicle to express hospitality and generosity.

In North America, he found Moroccan food was a cliché and hadn’t changed for decades. “I didn’t want to change the traditional foods but I felt it wasn’t honest to hold fast to traditions here. You can’t. Cumin isn’t the same as it is in Morocco. Chicken tastes different. In Marrakech, I got the best Moroccan food because it includes the smells, the sounds, the visuals of the city,” he said, in Vancouver last week.

“I have vivid memories of opening spice bags back home. Here, it doesn’t smell like anything. It’s probably two years old by the time you get it. The oils are gone. There’s nothing left but dust.”

Tagines, in Morocco are not glazed as they have to be to be sold in North America. “In Morocco, those unglazed tagines capture flavours down through the generations. If you pour water in it, put it over hot coals, within a few minutes, the water will be flavoured,” he says.

As a chef, he’s open to new ideas and tweaking the traditional dishes. But the cous cous, he says, is made by hand, by a cook who’s done it for 16 years.

At his restaurant, he replays the meals of his youth. “We debate about what to cook, talk, argue, figure out who’s going to buy what and then we cook. It’s the same process.”

He hopes the restaurant comes with life lessons for those who work and eat there. “I want to perpetuate the ideology that food is really important in life and it’s important to spend time making it. With the cookbook, I really want people to read my seven cooking lessons to understand and appreciate Moroccan cuisine.

“Good food doesn’t happen in 15 minutes. People have to give value to cooking. It’s a crucial part of who we are. Food is the glue of life.”

As a chef, he fulfills what was missing in economics. “It never takes into account happines or people. I realized that on paper, America is so far ahead but everything that made us happy in Marrakech, they didn’t have here. Having three cars and a big house – that’s not happiness.”

Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg

Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg

This bestselling duo flew in from New York to promote their ninth book, The Food Lover’s Guide to Wine (Little Brown, $39). Food icon Alice Water’s comment that wine is like a sauce to accent and enhance the flavour of food was their inspiration for the book. “We love food flavour more than anything on earth. Wine has the ability to make it even better,” says Page. “It’s a magic elixir to make food taste even better. It’s not something to be feared.”

They interviewed top sommeliers for insider information and introduce you to notable wine producers and their wines with food pairings. They talk in colour and music metaphors for communicating about wine flavours.

They even recommend wine with soup. “One of my favourites is split pea soup with a rose. They go beautifully together and I love split pea soup now,” sayd Dornenburg.

The couple are on a quest to get North America drinking more wine. In the U.S., at any rate, people drink soft drinks with dinner and that, to them, is intolerable. “We hope to introduce people to wine and pleasure, not just on special occasions but every day.”

In Europe, wine is primarily food-enhancing drink but winemakers are realizing people are wanting more food-friendly wines. “I think we’re all working out our relationship with wines”

Their book is accessible to the average wine drinker. “It’s not an Oxford Companion to wines with columns and columns of technical data,” says Page. “That creates a barrier. We talk about flavours in terms of peaches, apricots, lemon, cherries. A lot of wine writers have been academic and so focussed on the analytic approach as opposed to an emotional, sensual end. Nothing is more sensual than wine. They’re leaving out an important component.”

Says Dornenburg: “We want to bring it back to a normal dialogue. People don’t talk about what the brix [sugar level]at harvest was. You talk about getting a little strawberry and how the wine goes with tuna tartare.”

One of their tips is to pay attention to wine temperature. The red wine at room temperature rule came about before the age of air conditioning and central heating. “Room temperature can vary 15 to 20 degrees. “No wine should be served at more than 65 degrees [F],” says Page. “At a certain point, it becomes a grotesque cariacature. At 72 degrees, there’s no pleasure to be gotten.” They often pop reds in the fridge for 10 to 15 minutes, “especially in the winter when the heat’s turned up.”

Jennifer McLagan

McLagan’s most recent cookbook, Odd Bits: How to Cook The Rest of The Animal (Harper Collins, $39.99) is right in step with the times. She shows you how to learn to love the previously unlovable – bellies, brains, cheeks, necks, spleens, tongue, trotters, and for adventurous, testicles.

“I wanted to put all that information into one place. The ‘odd bits’ had fallen out of favour and you don’t see them in current cookbooks.”

It was also a moral issue for her. “It deals with how an animal is raised and how food is political. If you’re going to be a carnivore, then you have to think about how it’s raised and slaughtered. You can’t be throwing parts away and not eating the whole animal.”

Her latest cookbook, as well as her previous books (Bones, 2005) and (Fat, 2007) preserves disappearing skills. “It’s important to go back to the time before supermarkets – before toilet paper and meat were sold in the same place,” she says. “They killed local butchers and the exchange of information they provided and no one seems to be learning from parents and grandparents. I’m scared a whole lot of knowledge will be lost. It’s very important to know the provenance of the whole animal.”

Modern cooks have been ignoring these odd bits because factory meat has become so cheap. “Chicken is now so vile, we make up a thousand sauces for it. It’s really about the cheapening of meat. People feel the prime cuts are better. I’d argue they’re not. They’re not as interesting,” she says.

The texture of odd bits can be challenging if people aren’t used to them, she admits. “But it’s a big blockage between the ears. It’s a cultural thing. Look at every other culture. It’s part of everyday food.”

“Tongue is fab because you can eat it hot or cold and it’s creamy smooth,” she says. “Heart is dense and beefy. People think tripe is like a rubber band but properly cook, it’s soft and mild. Brain is like dense whipped cream and very mild. Testicles? “No flavour at all. It’s very very mild and has a fabulous texture, like mousse. In Toronto, there’s a big Persian community who like it. I’ve never seen so many testicles and sheep’s heads in my life.”

Nigella Lawson calls McLagan a “brave new woman” for taking on dietary correctness. Wait ’til Nigella sees the butchered pig’s trotters as main art on the front cover.

Michel Roux

Roux, a legendary culinary figure in Britain, now lives in Switzerland. H is son Alain now runs the Waterside Inn at Bray (with its three-Michelin star restaurant) but Roux remains a prolific cookbook author. He’s currently promoting his 12th called Desserts (Quadrille Publishing, $29.99), an update on classic desserts. It’s a solid, instructive and compact cookbook with beautiful photographs written by a pre-eminent professional.

Cooks, he says, can go wrong with desserts if you don’t take the time to read the recipes or by taking shortcuts or not understanding the theory and technique behind the instructions.

A crème brulee, for example, requires exact timing. “It must be just set and melt-in-your mouth,” he says.

The perfect dessert to him has “a delicious texture and is fluffy and delicate, small but not too sweet,” he says. “And when I finish it, I want more.”

His favourite is pavolova “with a perfect meringue and delicious seasonal fruit.” It’s light, tasty and nice to look at, he says.

Roux loves his August holidays in southern France with his three granddaughters. “They will each pick a dessert from one of my books and say ‘Pappy, we would love to do that’ and I correct what they are doing and explain the rationale. It is life. I am so proud and often when it’s done, it is better than my book. Youth beats the oldie.”

At 70, Roux still cooks at home “all the time” and feels there’s still room for improvement and creativity.

TEN TOP SECRETS FOR GETTING MORE PLEASURE FROM WINE from Food Lover’s Guide to Wine)

Do your homework. Be curious about what you’re drinking, who made it, and where.

Store it well. More than 95 per cent of wines are meant to be drunk right away but if you don’t plan to do so, store it in the right conditions – that is, at a consistently cool cellar temperature of about 55 degrees and on its side to keep the cork moist so air can’t enter.

Be age-appropriate. You’re not likely to have a peak experience if you’ve bottle-aged your Prosecco for a decade or if you open a just-released fine Brunello and expect it to show its potential immediately.

Check the temperature. Different wines show their best at different temperatures. We once dismissed an Italian red as too harsh until we read the back label: the recommended serving temperature was a full 10 degrees lower than it was on our first taste of it. After chilling, it turned around completely.

Let it breathe. So-called big wines (high in tannin, like Cabernet Sauvignon) can soften a bit (or a lot) when allowed to breathe for anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

Perceive its character. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If wine is gulped down without taking the time to see and sniff and savour it, does it have a flavour?

Pair it with complementary food. The right food will maximize your pleasure from virtually every wine. If you drink a great Cabernet Sauvignon with raw oysters, whose fault is it if you don’t enjoy it.

Use your judgment. Is the wine pleasurable? Which characteristics are most striking? Take notes, snap a photo of the label, so you can remember the wine and your impressions. Otherwise, the very nature of tasting wine often leads to foggy memories.

Share your experience. When you find a wine you love, tell your friends about it. Or blog or tweet it. Sharing a peak wine experience with others allows them to enjoy it vicariously and learn from it and both extends and expands the experience.

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